Underground Airlines(43)
I nodded. Yeah. I was already on my way. “Freedman Town.”
I knew what it was like to get a person to do something and they’re not sure why. To coerce. Give over some information; help you find an address. I did it all the days of my life. I didn’t know what I was stumbling into here, doing some kind of downtown deal or maybe bringing money to some rough boys so they’d teach a lesson to an ex-boyfriend. None of that seemed likely, just from my read on this girl, but people have layers in them. People go down deep. They go all the way down.
We got to the bridge to Freedman Town, a shabby two-lane span running over the slow brown churn of the White River. I was glad to be running Martha Flowers’s mysterious errand. All we do all day long is deal with our own problems, handle our shit some way or other. It felt nice, for a little while, to be dealing with someone else’s shit instead of my own.
“Wow,” said Martha. “God.”
I drove carefully through the streets down here—you had to. Potholes wide as craters, rocks and bottles in the street. The blasted apocalyptic acreage of Freedman Town.
Lionel craned up in his booster seat and peered with wonder out the windows.
I’d been here before. Not to this Freedman Town, but to plenty of others. I’ve been all over the North, and every northern city has a Freedman Town. New York City’s got a few, and Chicago’s got more than a few. Baltimore, Washington. The manumitted have got to go somewhere, and the world doesn’t give them a lot of options. The details are different—some of ’em are built on a high-rise model, bent towers clustered around courtyards, crammed to the gills with the poorest of the poor, living hard, the forgotten children of forgotten children. Some are like this one, blocks and blocks of small ramshackle homes, no sidewalks along narrow roads with the concrete worn and blasted through, the yards between the houses as weed-choked as vacant lots. Ivy growing in wild overlapping networks, engulfing the lower stories and sending menacing tendrils into upstairs windows. Gutters dangling or cracked, porches falling.
Martha, I could tell, had not been here before. Martha had never seen anything like it.
“Here,” said Martha. “Will you just—can we just stop here?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” She gnawed at her pinkie. We were a block, still, from the address she had given me. “Just give me one sec, I think.”
Her anxiety was a living thing, thrumming in the air between us, traveling through the recycled air of the Altima. She fiddled with the nearer stem of her sunglasses, sort of snapping it along the side of her head. A kid rolled slowly past the car on a skateboard, balancing a bucket on his head, while another kid taunted him not to drop it—“Careful, boy…careful, now…nice and easy”—then brayed laughter. There was a woman pushing a stroller, somehow keeping it in motion though she was on the phone and smoking a cigarette; the two-or three-year-old in the stroller was playing happily with a closed bottle of soda. A knot of tough boys sat on a stoop, smoking and staring hard at the street—the real thing, what my friends in Mapleton–Fall Creek had been aspiring to. As we watched, a man approached at a shuffle, opened a shoe box to them, offering whatever was in it for sale, and they shooed him away like they were kings.
A big nasty dog, tall as a wolf, wandered zigzag from side to side, trailing its leash.
“You can’t believe it,” Martha said darkly. “You can’t even f*cking believe it.”
“Watch your mouth, Mama.”
“Sorry, bear.” She reached into the backseat and patted her boy on the knee, but Lionel was off on his own trip, staring out the window, tapping his nose with his finger, like a kid concentrating on a math problem.
I didn’t feel it anymore. I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in the twenty-first century, in such a grevious state of disrepair. An invisible city, floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization.
A police cruiser made its slow way along the avenue, windows rolled up and tinted. The siren was off but the light was on, slowly flashing red and blue, red and blue. Not going to any particular emergency, just rolling through. Someone had spray-painted on the hood THE POLICE IS THE PATROL.
“You know what?” said Martha. “Forget it.”
“Forget what?”
“Just—let’s forget it. I don’t want to…” She looked back at Lionel, who was staring back at her. He had on his uneasy kid face, trying to read his mom, trying to figure out how serious this situation was.
The cop car had sharked past, turned right, and disappeared.
“All right,” I said, thinking, and started the car. “Sure.”
A knock at the driver’s-side window, three knocks, bang bang bang. A massive midsection was filling up the window, blocking out the daylight. Outside Martha’s window was another man, as big as the one on my side, who was now gesturing for me to roll down the window.
I didn’t have my gun. I couldn’t have brought it to my doctor’s appointment. I could see it, imagine the size of it, in the room safe at the Capital City Crossroads. I buzzed down the window and squinted out. A gigantic black man in a golf visor, a leather jacket over a tight T-shirt, his face acne-pitted and moon large. He leaned into the car and talked across me, addressing Martha.